| Intimacy and the false dichotomy of mind and body |
[28 Nov 2009|12:32pm] |
I'm not a huggy person. I'm just not. It's probably exacerbated by my depression but to what degree, I don't know.
I'm kind of famous for not hugging in my current group of friends. It started when I told one of them that I don't particularly enjoy being hugged and I very, very rarely hug other people. It became a standing in-joke when one of my friends hugged me without warning and I elbowed them in the gut. I'm quite serious about my personal space boundaries and just because someone is my friend doesn't mean that they get to ignore them.
Now, I'm not quite as hug-averse as this group of friends likes to pretend I am, but it's true that it's something I don't really feel a need for.
Trying to explain this to people has, on at least one occasion, resulted in them assuming that I'm a victim of sexual assault. I'm not. Not in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.
I strongly suspect that it's entirely the other way around. I don't feel a need for physical closeness because I avoid mental and emotional closeness, due to having been emotionally manipulated by religious authority figures.
I might have mentioned before that I'm a very thinky person. I live primarily in my thoughts and see my body as, to some degree, an extension of my mind. (Although, of course, in truth there is no distinction between the mind and the body. They are one and the same.)
The experience of being told, at the age of twelve or so, that the things that had, for my entire life up to that point, been upheld by all the authority figures in my life (including my parents) as The Infallible and Unchangeable Words of God were, in fact, more along the lines of The Pastor's Wife's Strongly Held Opinions About Religion has left its mark on my life.
When said pastor's wife died and the church underwent a doctrinal shift and accompanying schism, I was left adrift, confused, forced to confront a radically different (a.k.a. ever-so-slightly less fundamentalist, from my current point of view) interpretation of the scriptures I'd been brought up to think were THE most important thing in the world.
I didn't know it then but I suspect that that experience was the breaking point, for a lot of things.
It's taken me several years to realize that a lot of the adults in my life at the time only pretended to believe in the things they preached - ideas that I've spend many difficult and painful years breaking free of.
I ask you, if you found out that all or nearly all of the authority figures in your life were lying to you and trying to force you to act in ways contrary to your personality in order to to convince themselves that their beliefs were true, don't you think you would have trouble trusting people?
There are other factors, of course. Growing up without a lot of real friends didn't help much either. Learning early that if my peers were being nice to me, it was only so that they could mock me later amongst themselves hasn't exactly done wonders for my opinion of other people either.
But, at least as I see it now, it's having been flat-out lied to by the Authorities in my life (and keep in mind that fundamentalist religion tends to be Authoritarian in nature) that has led me to the thought pattern of "I'm never going to give anyone that kind of emotional hold over me again."
Now you can argue about love and trust and what I'm missing out on all day if you like, but given my experiences, this position isn't an unreasonable one.
And because for me, mental and emotional trust precede any desire for physical contact by a good bit, just being my friend doesn't mean that I'm going to let you touch me. It's partly that I just have a very weak desire for human contact and partly that hugging people, for me, indicates a level of emotional closeness that I let very, very few people achieve.
Now, if all of this was because of some horribly failed romantic relationship, people probably wouldn't find it so strange. But "I don't like people hugging me much because I used to be a religious fundamentalist" just makes people go "huh?"
There's probably also an element of the fact that my particular strain of religious fundamentalism was of a rather Puritan bent and, as such, tended toward aestheticism and denial of self and suchlike, including - at least in my case - such simple things as, well, hugging.
But on the whole I think that my feeling of having been lied to and betrayed by the religious leaders of my childhood has given me a different perspective on human interaction than that of many of my peers.
And knowing that it was done in the name of The Greater Good only makes it worse.
So no, I'm not a survivor of sexual abuse.
I'm a survivor of childhood indoctrination into religious fundamentalism.
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| Empathy |
[24 Nov 2009|02:04pm] |
Please, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, people, resist the urge to ask fast food workers how they're doing. We're fast food workers. We've got terrible wages, terrible hours, no insurance, no benefits, and precious little job mobility or security. And we have to listen to people whine at us all day. How the hell do you think we're doing?
Addendum: And if you absolutely can't resist the urge to ask, determined to advance your patronizing overtures of faux-concern, and the fast food worker says something like "fine" or "all right," FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, don't say "Just fine?" as though you expect us to shower you with a description of our amazing and wonderfully fulfilling lives as corporate wage drones.
Okay? Please?
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| Life of a Nerd |
[20 Nov 2009|01:50am] |
Step 1: Find out that Bethesda Softworks is offering Elder Scrolls: Arena and Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall for free download at their website.
Step 2: Spend 10 minutes downloading and installing two completely out of date games.
Step 3: Download and install DOSbox in order to run said games.
Step 4: Spend 20 minutes configuring DOSbox to run said games.
Step 5: Pause and reminisce about DOS being your first OS ever and how far computing has come since then.
Step 6: Realize that you are a complete and utter nerd.
Step 7: Post about it on your blog, cranking the nerd factor up to, well, either 11 or OVER NINE THOUSAND, depending on which tired meme comes to mind first.
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| Woe is me |
[05 Nov 2009|05:44pm] |
I've just discovered that Jones soda bottles have little messages inside the lids. (And not: "Sorry, you are not an instant winner," or the more modern and more annoying "Go online and enter this code to find out that you are not an instant winner," either!)
The first one I got said "Your life will be filled with sunshine" which is, for me, literally but not metaphorically true. The one I'm drinking now says "Always smile." Basement Cat* help me, even my sugary beverages are telling me to affect a facade of happiness now! *sigh*
*Or Ceiling Cat. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm an equal-opportunity invoker of pseudodeities. ;)
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[04 Nov 2009|02:13pm] |
I am tired, tired, tired of dealing with members of my parents' church asking me "How are you doing?" or "How is your family doing?"
I'm fracking sick of trying to paste a fake smile on my face and grit "fine," since answering honestly gets me nothing but annoying empty platitudes. "It'll get better," or "Just trust God" or what have you. Or, worse yet, the "count your blessings" response. Not in so many words, but.... yeah, I know I'm lucky to have a job at all, even if my job kinda sucks. It's my fucking life! Do you think I don't know that?
Gah. I hate living here so much.
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| Halloween post |
[30 Oct 2009|12:33pm] |
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Outgrabe - Witching Hour |
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I love wearing costumes. I like designing them, hunting for components, assembling the things I can't find. So, naturally, I like Halloween, because I get to wear a costume in public without people looking at me funny. (Yes, I have gone out in costume on random days for no reason before. I went to class dressed as "The Roaring 20's" once because I was bored. Srsly. I must have been less depressed than usual that day. I do slightly crazy things sometimes when I'm not depressed.
BUT anyway. This year, I'm going as a mad scientist (due in no small part to my current obsession with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which I may have forced all of my friends to watch and about which I am going to do a monster post blog thesis someday.)
I got some awesome goggles but then I totally failed to find the other costume bits I needed and then I got sick and have been stuck at home since. So I'm possibly going to end up looking more like a "Mad IT guy" which is... kind of funny, so hey.
But I had a rather depressing realization the other day.
When we're children, we're afraid of monsters. Made up things. Me, I was afraid, as a small child, that robot hands would come out of the electric sockets and drag me into them. I had strange fears, I guess.
And it's been noted before that it's hard to be properly terrified of the sort of big things adults are afraid of (Pollution! Global Climate Change! AAAAHHH! THEY'RE OUT TO GET ME! Yeah, doesn't work so well, huh?)
But then I realized that, for a person like me who lives in a ...somewhat urban-ish area in a developed nation, the thing that I have to be most legitimately afraid of is... other people. I meah, yeah, muggers and stuff, but also things like fearing dying of an asthma attack because some health insurance CEO would rather get a bonus they haven't earned than allow a system in which I can afford to get the medication that lets me breathe almost as well as a normal person. THAT is what terrifies me now. And I find that kind of sad. I'd rather be afraid of the electric-socket robot monsters.
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| AAaaargh |
[25 Oct 2009|09:02pm] |
Worked long shift yesterday and today. Naturally, I started to feel sick yesterday. Felt even worse today. The car I usually borrow to get to work has been in the shop for almost 3 weeks so I had to get rides from two different people to get to and from work. The Sunday Lunch Crowd decided to skip lunch and become the Sunday Dinner Crowd for no apparent reason. Also, I am hardcore losing my voice and my eczema is flaring up on my hands.
Today was not a fun day.
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| In: Things That Make Absolutely No Sense |
[23 Oct 2009|12:43pm] |
So, like, in the US, we've decided that a huge amount of food preparation is something to be shoved off on people who are young, mostly untrained for other jobs, etc. We then make all these jobs pay as little as possible, and make sure they never get enough hours to be full-time.
So we've got this huge number of people who can't get employer-provided insurance and probably can't afford private insurance working with food. So these are now people who, if they get sick, are less likely to be able to get medical care and also more likely to come to work sick, on account of needing more money to pay for any medical care they might be able to get. And they're working with food.
In what way does this make any sense at all? (Other than, yanno, the usual reason of "higher profits for people higher up the corporate ladder.")
This is something that's been bugging me lately.
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| Politics, H1N1, animal genders |
[18 Oct 2009|01:33pm] |
A few random things.
First, my coworker, hereby dubbed "A" has uncle B, father of child C. C's mother, D has, as of a few days ago, a confirmed case of H1N1. Because of this, B and C are currently living with A. A works in fast food. A and those of us who work with A all really hope that neither B nor C is carrying H1N1.
On a more political note, The Sibling goes to school in Texas. The Sibling's university recently sent them a survey about the economy, current political situation, etc. The Sibling brought it home, where it was read aloud over the dinner table. Most of the questions were things like "Is your family better or worse off than last year?" and "How confident are you in Pres. Obama's economic policies?"
The question that amused the hell out of me was: "Who are you likely to vote for in the upcoming Texas Gubernatorial election?" with possible answers "Rick Perry(R)," "Kay Bailey Hutchinson(R)," "Neither" (or maybe it was "No one"), or "Other."
Two-party system? What two-party system?
Granted, they probably just picked the two highest-polling options or something, but still.
On a third note, completely unrelated to the first two, I am now somehow the animal gender police. Um, that sounded wrong. What I mean is, I seem to find myself constantly correcting other people's gender pronouns when referring to animals. There's this tendency to assume that animals are male - when this extends to things like ants and bees, (and more rarely, anglerfish), which are mostly female, it gets on my nerves. So I've started calling people on it. When people say things like "Look at that ant! He's trying to drag that dead wasp!" I tell them "She. Worker ants are female." Because ants are cool and interesting and they deserve to have people learn at least enough about them to know things like that. And also because I get tired of humans verbally changing animals' genders in order to make them fit into our own crazy societal models. (Other) animals have their own societal models, dammit! (See also: wolves, actual behavior vs. what most people believe about them).
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[11 Oct 2009|12:55pm] |
Since my life continues to be depressing and repetitive, I offer to the denizens of the intarwebs the following amusing anecdote.
I love working with a bunch of nerds. This kind of thing is why.
My (female, somewhat nerdy) manager, on a conversation with some dude: "I'd met him before and he never really seemed that attractive but this time, he started talking to me and... man, his charisma score totally beat my charisma score."
Said manager is by no means the nerdiest person I work with.
So yeah, working for minimum wage in the fast food biz ain't exactly my dream life but it does have its moments.
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| So does The Matrix have me or what? |
[04 Oct 2009|09:30pm] |
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music |
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what do you think? |
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Today, I was Rickrolled at work. By my corporate overlords. Or, you know, whoever chooses the songs available on the corporate radio station. I turned to my equally nerdy and 'net-savvy coworker and said "Is the radio playing what I think it's playing?" They said "Yeah. We just got Rickrolled by [place of employment.]"
So yeah.
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[19 Sep 2009|12:12am] |
In news unrelated to the real subject of this blog post: went to a raffle today. 3 of the 4 friends I went with won prizes. The other had to leave early to see a movie with someone else. Me, I faceplanted into some gravel and skinned both my palms. You win some, you lose some...
So, America. I was born and raised in the US and that makes me an American. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be one. I didn't get a chance to opt in to my US citizen identity and I can't exactly just opt out of it either. And I'm not always happy about that - especially lately because I've finally learned enough about my country's history to know that being a citizen of this nation makes me complicit in a lot of things I would rather have no part in.
The American Dream, it seems, was always just that - a dream - except for a lucky few.
It's not like the US occupies a singularly shameful place in the world's history. Humans are humans everywhere and there is always hatred and injustice and suchlike but, as Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility. And being the only current global superpower carries with it an enormous amount of responsibility. And in my lifetime, I've seen that power used to evil, shameful ends. I've seen my government start unjust wars. My government has tortured people. My government has illegally spied on its own citizenry. And all this is added only to the history of a nation that, though "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" (if I recall correctly), began its history with genocide and theft and has committed a host of atrocities since then. It is not without redeeming qualities. There are plenty of good things about the US. But I'm tired of the "Greatest Nation On Earth" bullshit. I'm tired of the "We're Always The Good Guys" nonsense. I'm tired of the childish, black and white, dumbed-down version of America that's spoon-fed to us our whole lives. Discovering the things that have been done by my country - and my country's government - has been like the part in The Giver where Jonas discovers what goes on behind the scenes in the Community. The casual, ritualized atrocities that all of the adults are complicit in because it facilitates their way of life. Yeah. My country exploits the poor worldwide so we can have cheap stuff. Did I mention we also tortured people? And the fact that we just let thousands of people die because they can't afford to pay insurance companies? And the fact that the president telling kids to continue their education is controversial if that president is black and a democrat? Need I continue?
Sometimes I am ashamed of my country.
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| Rage |
[18 Sep 2009|01:28am] |
So, according to this article at MSNBC, one study concluded that as many as 45,000 people a year die in the US because of lack of healthcare coverage. Forty-five thousand. That's four and half times the population of the town I live in. Okay, so it's relatively small compared to total US population, but... damn. 45,000. I hope that number is inflated. I see stuff like this and I just go straight to rage.
This shouldn't be happening here. I know that the reality of America has never been anywere near the dream of it. In fact, I'm pretty damn cynical about the United States. But even the possibility that we might be just letting that many people die in a year because they couldn't get healthcare makes me want to smash things. Preferrably insurance company CEO and/or shareholder egos.
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| Politics |
[04 Sep 2009|12:46pm] |
I know it's pretty much inevitable, given human nature but I hate how sometimes politics stops being about political ideology or goals altogether and just becomes stupid My-Team-Is-Better-Than-Your-Team theatrics.
Case-in-point: Obama wants to tell nation's youth to stay in school, Republicans respond that "Skool is for loooooooosers!!!" This is the level of political discourse where I live. Seriously. I have friends arguing that "stay in school" is offensive because "college isn't for everyone." (Which is true but given the fact that in order to get any kind of decent chance at actually learning anything in this country, you have to either live in a rich school district or go to college, I hardly think "go to college" should be a controversial statement from the nation's leader. Bah.)
Sometimes I just want to yell "STOP BEING SO STUPID!" at people. This is one of those times.
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| Hi, my name is Ira and I've been socially inept for 20-odd years |
[31 Aug 2009|12:21pm] |
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Sirenia - At Sixes and Sevens |
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My coworkers find my social ineptitude endearing and hilarious.
I find this somewhat frustrating. I mean, I understand their position. It can be funny to watch someone struggle with something you've already figured out. The humor can even come from empathy with the other person's struggles, rather than straight out sadism. But it's still kind of frustrating to be in the position of the person who keeps failing at stuff - in my case, proper employee-customer interaction, apparently.
I fall into the trap of thinking that I'm not all that bad with people because I'm really good at reflexively avoiding the types of interpersonal situations that I can't handle properly. I'm actually pretty good at first impressions because people find me engaging and knowledgeable when they first meet me. It's my problems with understanding how relationships are supposed to progress and trouble articulating my rather-complicated set of boundaries that people run up against when they get to know me better that show how socially inept I really am.
But there's also the fact that in interactions that are supposed to go according to a certain formula, more or less, like dealing with customers, I don't always react well when people go off-script. Specifically, I get frustrated with people who ask stupid questions or who try to treat me like an inferior. When people try to talk to me like I'm some dumb high school kid, I have the unfortunate tendancy to get a bit condescending to them in return. I'm not really a very good coroporate cog. I need rules to be logical and make sense before I have any comittment to following them. This applies both to work-related rules and social ones. (As an aside, this is part of why the whole dating institution confuses the hell out of me. There are all these stupid, backward, arbitrary rules you're supposed to follow that mostly seem to be predicated on the idea that people of the opposite sex aren't just regular human beings.) This is The Way Things Are Done doesn't hold water with me. I want to know why things are done this or that way.
I have trouble with social scripts. I have trouble pretending I'm interested in things when I'm not. I have trouble dealing with other people's emotions. (It's not that I don't want people to have feelings or that I don't want them to express those feelings, it's just that I don't know how they expect me to react sometimes.
And anyway, I don't always see how bad I am with people because I don't have a lot of basis for comparison. And then every once in awhile, someone will say something or something will happen and I'll realize how very different my experience of the world is than most other people's.
So yes, I am, by and large, socially inept, even though I can be quite brilliant in a few specific types of social situations.
I just don't understand the shape that other people think social situations are supposed to take sometimes.
Strangely, this draws some people to me, apparently. I guess that in small doses, my disregard for social conventions is humorously endearing. But for me, it's my life. I just don't do "normal" very well, so I've said "to hell with normal" and just done the best I can.
People seem to find my geekiness, my strangeness either tiresome or amusing. Apparently, I am people's endearingly weird friend. And I don't really mind that, most of the time. But it's still frustrating sometimes to be reminded of the gulf between myself and "normality." Not that I want to be normal. I don't. Nor do I want everyone to be like me. I just kind of wish that I felt like more people had some kind of understanding of my kind of view of the world. Or maybe I just wish that people would explain to me all the unspoken rules that I'm missing, rather than just finding it cute when I don't get it.
I'm not really sure.
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| On Sports |
[20 Aug 2009|07:29pm] |
So I hate sports. Especially organized team sports. I'm short and asthmatic and uncoordinated and terrible at every sport I've ever tried. The only physical activity I've ever had any success at is Tae Kwon Do, which I loved and would like to get back into, if it didn't mean having to deal with an entirely new social group.
I never even liked sports video games. Madden games? Yawn. About as fun as having my teeth drilled, in my opinion. (Which is about where my opinion of actual football ranks on the fun scale as well. To each their own and all, I suppose.)
And yet I like Wii Sports and I really like Wii Sports Resort. I even like the sports that I don't like. It baffles me. And my mother will play it with me as well and she doesn't like videogames!
Wii sports: a sports videogame that (some) people who don't like sports or videogames still like. It defies all logic. But in a fun way.
(I mean, yes, it's essentially a bunch of minigames but they're still sports-themed minigames, which usually bore me to tears. I just don't get it.)
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[19 Aug 2009|04:48pm] |
Ugh. Another bad day, depression-wise.
I've decided that, after nearly 3 months of trying to get to an emotional space where I can even look at job postings without breaking down and crying and giving myself stress headaches, etc. and failing, well, it seems like my best option is to see whether I get get on some kind of private insurance that would allow me to get help for my depression. Affording it on my minimum-wage salary isn't going to be fun but paying for depression meds out-of-pocket probably ain't gonna happen. And I'm never going to get a better job and get out of here if I can't even think about looking for another job without nasty anxiety spikes.
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| I should be asleep but I am not |
[19 Aug 2009|03:29am] |
I realized recently that I've spent most of my life being better informed about various things than many of the adults or sundry other authorities in my life. I've always been the person who corrects other people's facts when they're wrong - although I'm usually able to be gracious when someone else corrects mine.
It's only now that I realize how annoying that must have been when I was a little kid, calling adults out for not knowing as much as they thought they did. (Prompted by my mother's surprise and barely-restrained glee at actually knowing more than I do about a subject which she is currently studying.)
On a related note, I'm beginning to wonder how much my (probably annoying) habit of automatically explaining everything I do or talk about comes from the fact that, most of the time, people don't know what I'm talking about until I explain it to them.
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| Outrage |
[16 Aug 2009|11:30pm] |
Gaaah! The White House is willing to compromise on having a public option in the damn healthcare reform bill? WTF? Fuck, I wish I could afford to move somewhere civilized and not have to worry so much about this shit.
Geez, people. 60 senate seats and the Dems are still caving to the Rethugs on healthcare? Oh yeah, they're being paid off by the fucking healthcare industry! Fuck! What happened to government "for the people?"
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| On Experience |
[13 Aug 2009|11:32am] |
So I've been watching the whole healthcare thing with equal parts fascination and horror. On the one hand, it all seems... bizzarely centered on me. I'm a recent college grad with a fast food job that offers no healthcare provisions at all for us peons. I've got one parent on unemployment and the other on long-term disability, and I'm struggling to find a way to make sure I can get the asthma medications I need to help me breathe once I run out of the stuff I got while I was under my parents' coverage/ my parents had coverage.
And I would really, really, really like to know that if I got sick, I could go see a doctor without having to worry whether I'll have to sell off my vital organs to pay for it.
And even my right-wing mother has begun to say that we need "healthcare, not sickcare." Probably because she spends enough time on the phone with insurance companies every week to nearly count as a part-time job.
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